Dresden

I've just finished watching a video about the reconstruction of Dresden and am flooded with memories of a time gone by.

Sometime in the early 90s my friend Jerry called me and said, "It's time." We were in the army together in the 60s and had made a trip to Italy to visit relatives of his in Torino. Our strongest memory of that trip was the time we spent in Florence, where I remember looking up at the splendid villas and thinking wouldn't it be great to see this glorious city from up there in the hills. Jerry and I were travelling on the cheap, but we promised each other that some day we would come back and get closer to the full splendor. Now, thirty years later, we had the money and it was time.

When I mentioned the upcoming trip to my friends Bob and Hiro (I was living in Japan at the time), they asked if they could join us.  Two friends of Jerry's had also asked to join in and this nostalgic "full splendor" journey had suddenly grown to six people. This meant it would be cheaper for us to rent apartments in Siena, Florence and Rome than to stay in hotels. The excitement built as we collected recipes from Italian cookbooks and envisioned sitting around at long Italian tables filled with pasta and Chianti and squeezing all the Italy out of the experience we possibly could.

Because I couldn't go to Europe without visiting Berlin - the place Jerry and I had spent most of our Cold War Army days - I added ten days at the beginning of the trip. Bob, who had heard all my tales of my years in Berlin, decided he wanted to join me for that part of the trip as well and not just the Italian part.  I was, of course, delighted to be able to share Berlin and Potsdam with him and with Hiro.

What I didn't realize was that Bob and Hiro were on their last legs as a couple, that Hiro was a fistful of resentment and Bob had an equal amount of guilt about having cheated on him, enabling Hiro to lead him around by the nose. The trouble started in Potsdam, when I took them to Sans Souci, one of my all-time favorite places, where one could walk the paths that Frederick the Great walked with Voltaire and imagine all sorts of lofty conversations about the meaning of life. Hiro's pronouncement on the Berlin trip? "I don't like Protestant cities. It's the Catholic cities in the South where all the beauty is."

I was determined not to be drawn in to their personal squabbles and not let this dream trip get off on the wrong foot, so I kept silent. Hiro would miss the point that this time in Berlin was to share my German identity with Bob and revel in the personal and the political history. It was not a time for gazing at cathedrals or Michelangelo's Pietà (although we would get to them too, eventually).

From Potsdam we moved on to Dresden, where I was taken by surprise at how completely I would get swept up by the stark and unfamiliar atmosphere.  When the Berlin Wall came down and Germany reunified and it became possible to travel in the former East Germany, I had had my first close encounter with the effects of socialist priorities in Potsdam. The East Germans had little money and prioritized housing and social welfare over restoration of the buildings of empire. As a result, Sans Souci, Freddie's getaway for himself and his dogs, and the larger New Palace, Kaiser Wilhelm II's last residence, were still in drab disrepair. The gardens were splendid; it didn't take a fortune to develop them, but putting back the structures of the elite of days gone by was not a priority. Now, here in Dresden, there was another dimension: decades after the war they still had not rebuilt the inner city. One could walk around spaces in the downtown area as large as football fields and find only emptiness. A profound sense of depression sank over me and I began looking forward to getting out of Dresden and on to Prague and Vienna and our "let's do it right" trip to Italy with Jerry and two of his friends.

Sitting in a MacDonald's café right in the center of Dresden's downtown, directly across from where the Frauenkirche once stood, I looked out over this evidence of human cruelty. The world will forever debate the decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but for me, at least, the fire bombing of Dresden is not up for debate. I had spent a lot of time on World War II history and was familiar with the arguments over whether it was necessary to bomb Dresden into the ground.  The war was clearly won by the time, in February 1945, the British RAF with American help saturated the city with enough bombs to cause a firestorm that melted human flesh. Overkill, it would seem, now with the benefit of hindsight.

There was no need for that degree of savagery. It was clearly done as a humiliation exercise. Dresden was Germany's cultural center, Hitler's pride and joy. Its military significance is contested, and I don't want to make a case for it here. Either way, the misery and death brings home the fact that we are at the mercy of decisions made by those in high places who can and do make Realpolitik decisions in which human beings can be redefined as unfortunate-but-necessary "collateral damage."  I grew up in America where people bewailed the loss of American lives in World War II. But I grew up in a German family and bewailed the loss of German lives, as well, and struggled to make sense of how easily the Germans could have been led by the nose to follow a Pied Piper who promised to solve all their problems for them. Since the Russians invaded Ukraine, I have been repeating this experience. While most people mourn the loss of life among Ukrainians, I am acutely aware of the cannon fodder among Russian youth. I mourn Russian deaths these days and wonder why Russians can't or won't rise up in protest. And I am reliving the aching question of how Americans can be following a modern-day fascistically-inclined leader who promises ("Only I can do it!") to bring back America's better days.

Henry Kissinger died this week. In a more just world, I believe this man should have been tried as a war criminal. He is directly responsible for the death of between three and four million people, many of them Cambodians in a country we had never declared war on. That decision then cascaded into the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge regime which brought about the "killing fields" where another million and a half people lost their lives.  If you want, you can also call this a "contested" decision: Henry Kissinger got a Nobel Prize for fighting communism and got to live to the age of 101 and be embraced by America's ruling class right up to the end. Kissinger also helped in the assassination of a legitimately elected socialist in Chile, Salvador Allende, who was replaced by Augusto Pinochet, known for dropping young people objecting to his regime from planes into the sea.

In modern times, we have Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. Just as Kissinger can justify his actions by declaring he was fighting communism, Netanyahu determined it was in his interest to support the Hamas regime in Gaza to counterbalance the Palestinian Authority, which, if it could gather sufficient steam, would work on a two-state solution in the Middle East. Hamas launched a barbaric attack on Israel on October 7th and the Israelis are retaliating by killing countless thousands of Gazans caught in the fire - "collateral damage" - as they try to root out this same Hamas regime. How it is the Israelis have not ridden Netanyahu out of town on a rail, or at least locked him up as a Hamas supporter, remains a mystery.

There are two schools of thought in Israel. One, the one I relate to, starts from the premise that Israelis and Palestinians have no choice but to learn to live together. Neither of them is going away. The decades of pushing the Palestinians out and the adamant resistance of Palestinians to the establishment of a Jewish state in their midst have only prolonged death and destruction. Israeli progressives want to find their way out of this dilemma through cooperation. The other school of thought, the one embraced by Netanyahu and those who believe God gave the Jews the entire land of Palestine, is that there is no reason to believe in cooperation, that trust is naive and all one can do is fight tooth and nail to keep Palestinians from gaining the upper hand. In his mind, he's doing what's best for Israel, just at Kissinger was convinced his way of fighting communism was worth the collateral damage. If you wiggle just right, you can see things from these men's perspectives and even make their case for them.  But then you eventually reach the kind of justification that gives Hitler a pass as well. He too was a moral man, provided you are willing to argue that morality is best understood as what's good for the German people, all others be damned.  It's taboo to suggest that Putin's "What's good for Russia, Ukraine be damned," Netanyahu's "What's good for Israel, Palestinians be damned" and Trump's "What's good for America, the rest of the world be damned" are parallel thoughts, ultimately. But that's what it comes down to - we think in terms of human universals or we split into warring factions led by lesser beings.

In the U.S., we have the MAGA folks propping up a man responsible for thousands of deaths by spreading misinformation about vaccines, a man who suggested we use bleach to cure Covid, that a contest between blacks and white supremacists has "good people on both sides,"  a man who refers to his political enemies as "vermin" - in a direct throw-back to Nazi name-calling. So much for American exceptionalism.

There is no reason to automatically link these thoughts, the bombing of Dresden, the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the Kissinger deaths in Cambodia and Chile, the brutal invasion of Ukraine, the Netanyahu/Hamas deaths in Israel/Palestine. That's just me allowing the thoughts in my head to run free.

Sometimes I go to YouTube to bring me rich wonderful classical music by a half dozen or more of my favorite pianists and just sit back and groove.

Today I just happened on this video of the reconstruction of Dresden.

Random selections.

Random thoughts.